Overpriced or Undervalued?

A guy from my work asked me to quote him a price for making a semi-static, 5 page website for his restaurant today. I say 'semi-static' because he said he'd want to upload changes to the menu as appropriate, so I thought I'd use "the old XML-data source" methodology and provide him with an Excel Workbook that dumps out the XML generator, rather than getting bogged down in server-side scripting.

I thought about it a bit and quoted him £150-£175 for the site, and will match it to the menus/take-away menus he's already had made up - this was after seeing that another local developer charges £75 for a static site.

Sounds like I'll also have to go and take some photos on-site as well, so I said I'd charge extra for my time for those.

Can I have people's opinions on this, because the last site I did, I was told I'd get paid £1,000 to make it and basically had to do everything myself (including scanning in about 260 slides and 'touching them up').

I agree. Of course, your need a few nice examples that serve their clients well, are on-brand, are attractive, are structured well and have usable navigation (even if the sites are simple, these principles still apply). If you can do that, there are people who will pay for a better site. There are also people who just want a crap site, and crappy developers prepared to meet their demands for pennies on the pound.

Even though the site may be small, you usually are spending a lot of time building comps for the site so with that work alone I tend to charge at least $1000 even for the smallest sites. Coming up with a great looking and usable design is the hard work. Coding the site is cake and very straight forward most of the time.

Originally Posted by orkle
I'd say you were massively under charging to be honest!

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That's reasurring! He is a mate from work, admittedly, but how much would you expect to pay for something like this?

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Originally Posted by netdog
I agree. Of course, your need a few nice examples that serve their clients well, are on-brand, are attractive, are structured well and have usable navigation (even if the sites are simple, these principles still apply). If you can do that, there are people who will pay for a better site. There are also people who just want a crap site, and crappy developers prepared to meet their demands for pennies on the pound.

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That is part of the reason why I want to charge reasonably - although I've done work on this kind of thing before, I'm just starting out doing it under a company name, so I need to build up a base of work.

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Originally Posted by radiantm3
I agree, although it definitely depends on your skill level and experience.

Even though the site may be small, you usually are spending a lot of time building comps for the site so with that work alone I tend to charge at least $1000 even for the smallest sites. Coming up with a great looking and usable design is the hard work. Coding the site is cake and very straight forward most of the time.

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That's a great link to a site - thanks radiantm3. £150 equates to about $300 or so. He wants a pretty quick turn-around on it too, but I do have their menu design to go on, so the design phase is pretty much out of my hands (except for navigability). I'll probably mock it up in iWeb then pick through (and optimise) the code.

Regarding skill level and experience, I have a degree in Computer Science, I've lectured Higher National Certificate in Web Design at a local College of Further Education, and I'm an IT developer at a high-street bank, although I haven't done too much web development in my job. I'm just a little rusty / behind the times at the moment!

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